Marketing: Power, Illusion, and Reality

What do Apple, Old Spice and Absolut Vodka have in common? They each took a simple concept and created among the most successful ad campaigns in history. How? Clever marketing.

Marketing, at its basic level, is the process of interesting potential customers in a product or service. But corporations today know more about our personalities, interests and spending patterns than ever before, and increasingly manipulate language and emotion to make us buy.

This is a talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of marketing, how the Christian faith might influence it, and how valuable it is for marketers to speak authentically to their customers.

Recommended Reading

As a primer for our first talk, check out this page. It comes from the podcast “Under the Influence” by Terry O’Reilly.

For us, we don’t think twice about wearing deodorant, avoiding bad breath, or checking a toothpaste box for “whitening.” It hasn’t always been that way. The 20th century saw our cities grow and our lives intersect more than ever. Folks began to compare themselves with their peers, and companies began to levy shame to sell products.

Terry O’Reilly gives us a glimpse what’s gone on in the marketing board rooms. They’ve managed to change how we see ourselves and each other.